Below is the third and final part of an essay I wrote for the book, Order of the Sacred Earth, authored by one of my mentors, Matthew Fox, along with Skylar Wilson and Jennifer Berit Listug. Enjoy!

The Order of the Sacred Earth offers a promising path towards a more sustainable, healthy, and corporative future on our planet. It is based on a story that is Spirit centered, Earth centered, and community centered. It asks would be participants to commit to a sensible, sustainable, and viable future. It asks of us to transcend our differences and rally around our common interest, a livable planet. The OSE appreciates that our survival is dependent on our combined action. It suggests that the issues that threaten our existence are a plea for us to step into the next phase of our collective evolution.

The OSE calls on us to pursue the development of our higher potentials individually as well as collectively, celebrating the power and value of our uniqueness while also acknowledging the greater synergistic value of our mutuality. Accordingly, community is central to its formation. The idea of a community embraces the notion that the whole is greater that the sum of the parts. We are capable of more by working together than alone. At the higher stages of human development an individual sees itself intricately linked to others, and knows that isolation limits its own capacity to maximize its potential to add value in the world. Through community we are able to take advantage of each other’s gifts and generate more power to act on our objectives.

The OSE calls on us to take full responsibility for our connection to this Earth. It recognizes that we are the Earth. It understands that care of the Earth is care for ourselves, and that its health reflects that of our own. The OSE invites us to explore together sustainable ways of living that allows for the greatest amount of well-being for all. It invites us to take a vow to collectively care for the Earth as a means to commit to our common interest. The OSE appreciates the sacredness of this Earth. The simple fact that we cannot exist without it suggests that the Earth deserves our reverence.

The OSE isn’t dogmatic. It encourages us to explore and discover new ideas while preserving the best of what we already know. It invites to seek wisdom from all sources of human knowledge from science to religion. It welcomes the atheist, the agnostic, as well as the religious. Regardless of our preference, it ask us to embrace the wisdom from the various religious traditions without falling prey to outdated dogmas that could constrain our capacity to experience the deeper dimensions of what they have to offer. It invites us to accept the gifts of science, while not succumbing to a dogmatic notion that it is the sole progenitor of and means to knowledge.

The OSE recognizes and embraces the power and validity of spiritual/mystical experience. Owing to its subjectivity, admittedly there are a variety of ways to describe these types of experiences. Interpretations are dependent on one’s worldview. For example, a Christian will likely interpret a spiritual experience in terms of a Christian ideological framework. A staunch scientific materialistic may even deny the legitimacy or subjective value of the experience, and may simply describe it as a mere byproduct of an extraordinary shift in biochemistry. Nonetheless, in my opinion, these different perspectives do not invalidate the value or relevancy of spiritual experience in human life. Mystics from various traditions and cultures, from past to present suggest that the essence of mystical experience is fundamental to our nature. Common qualitative descriptors for them are a feeling of bliss, boundlessness, love, awe, beauty, light, and wonder. These are the type of qualities that the OSE suggest we cultivate to support a more sustainable and loving world. The OSE acknowledges that no one has sole ownership on how to name or access these experiences. It therefore encourages exploration into the multiplicity of avenues that are available to us. We currently have access to a plethora of ancient and contemporary methodologies from all around the world. They are designed to maximize our capacity to tap into spiritual experience, as well as develop our ability to express the qualities they evoke in our daily lives.

The OSE offers a great opportunity for us to come together to not only solve the problems that face our existence, but to become more fully human. I believe that the more fully human we become, the more we’ll embrace a manner of living that is sustainable, communal, affable, loving, kind, and compassionate. The challenges we are facing encourages us to move forward in our evolution. I believe that the OSE is the kind of collective movement that will contribute not only to our survival, but also to our capacity to harmoniously thrive together on this precious Earth for generations to come.

Below is the second part of an essay I wrote for the book, Order of the Sacred Earth, authored by one of my mentors, Matthew Fox, along with Skylar Wilson and Jennifer Berit Listug. I will include part 3 in a subsequent post. Enjoy!

Our story about the world stems from and is bound by our worldview. A worldview is a collection of ideas that functions like a lens, filtering out sense data and shaping our perception of the world. The story that we hold, part consciously and part subconsciously, determines our actions. If we want to change our actions, we must change our story. We humans have long navigated our experience through story. From the stories of the great myths to the current story of science and modernity, we’ve invented tales to guide us through the uncertainty and variability of life. These stories were not randomly conceived out of nothing. To the contrary, they were intelligently considered out of real experiences constrained by a particular psychological frame of reality. As our minds developed further, enhancing our capacity to extract more subjective and objective data from our experiences, it enabled us to create more complex and inclusive stories. Well, new data is pouring in, and it is suggestive of a need for a better and more sophisticated story to navigate our experience sustainably.

Throughout our history old stories have given way to new. The old became the foundation of the new. Like now, our current worldview must be the foundation for the construction of a better, more sustainable worldview. Those of us who are troubled about our current state of affairs can easily succumb to a stymying cynicism, where everything about our current worldview and narrative is hopelessly flawed and irredeemable. Such a perspective leads one to totally disregard everything about our current construction of reality. I admittedly fell prey to this level cynicism and as a result disengaged from society. I ultimately found that this thinking undermined my capacity to mitigate suffering in a way that I desired.

It is indeed true that all worldviews have their pathological aspects, including our current one. And it is also true that every worldview has healthy aspects that promote goodness and beauty. I fervently believe that there is a significant amount of good about a dominant construction of reality that overwhelmingly embraces universal human rights. For instance, though imperfect, the current dominant worldview in the U.S. decries slavery and seeks to encourage universal human rights for all. In the not so distant past, the dominant worldview denied these rights to groups outside of white men, and justified slavery and the subjugation of women. This type of transformation into more inclusion is arguably a clear example of an evolution in worldview. It would behoove us to keep those positive aspects of the various ways humans have structured the world in place and build on top of that. Those parts of our worldview that support ignorance, unsustainability, divisiveness, hatred, insensitivity, neglect, and disregard of the other is what we want to disengage and transcend, i.e. get rid of the bath water and keep the baby.

We do not live in a world where we all see eye to eye. Some of us may adopt more or less the same worldview and still hold different viewpoints depending upon an emphasis of attention on different aspects of that worldview. For example, in the politics of the American 2 party system, you may have a member of one party who focuses their attention on economic and individual freedoms while another of the opposing party focuses attention on the social welfare of all citizens. They both value human rights, individual freedoms, and the free market; however, each one will approach how they govern in terms of their primary interest.

On the other hand, you may have folks who inhabit very different worldviews. This poses a different set of challenges when attempting to work together to solve problems that threaten our common interest. For example, continuing the analogy of our 2 party system, one member may fervently maintain that the world was created by a human like being in 7 days around 6,000 years ago. This anthropomorphic being manages and determines the course of the world from the heavens. Another may inhabit the view that the world, as we know it, came into being 13.8 billion years ago from a big explosion out of nothing. To them, the world is managed by the process of evolution and the associative laws that came into being with this big explosion. Finding common ground across these worldviews may pose more of a challenge than the former example. Yet, we are all beneficiaries of the consequences of the concerning issues that threaten our existence. Therefore, we must find a way to common ground concerning the cause of sustaining our presence on Earth.

In order to address the issues that we are facing we need to adopt a new story that extracts the best knowledge from different domains of knowing from past to present. We need a story that honestly considers the information that we are being presented with now. And right now, we are being called upon to evolve our story into more complexity and sophistication. It needs to consider honestly the historical observations of our past. Our past has so much to teach us, and yet, we don’t need to overly romanticize or denigrate it. We need to embrace what can serve us in our evolution and relinquish that which stagnates us. We need a story that recognizes our collective interest in working together. It should be a story that is able to both celebrate and transcend our differences while acknowledging our sameness. We need a story that embraces our connection to the Earth. It would recognize that the well-being the Earth reflects our own well-being. This story must be intergenerational where the wisdom of the elders is fused with the creative impulsiveness of the youth. It must embrace the best of science, acknowledging that scientific thinking and exploration has been one the most extraordinary achievements in our evolution. It must also embrace the truth claims of the various religious traditions, recognizing the value of thousands of years of exploration into the realm of Spirit. For those who are fervently against these traditions for various reasons, I strongly encourage an exploration into the tremendous amount of wisdom that they have to offer. As earlier stated, we must caution against throwing the baby out with the bath water.

Below is the first part of an essay I wrote for the book, Order of the Sacred Earth, authored by one of my mentors, Matthew Fox, along with Skylar Wilson and Jennifer Berit Listug. I will include parts 2 & 3 subsequent post. Enjoy!

Life is a reflection of its environment. Throughout the 200,000 years of its history, humans have responded to their environment in order to survive. Our history and self-sense has been shaped by our experiences under various conditions on this planet. In our migration out of Africa into the various corners of the world, we’ve had to adapt to the places we found ourselves. This planet, with its plentiful, colorful, and robust forms of life, has molded and shaped our humanity into its current manifestation. We are among the multitude of morphing expressions of the evolution of our planetary system, and we are at a critical phase in this process.

How shall we proceed along this process in the midst of the myriad concerns we face from global warming to poverty to political destabilization that threatens the existence of life as we know it? What must we do to make the evolutionary leap to a more sensible and sustainable coexistence on this earth? I believe we must find a means to build bridges and coalitions to tackle the global issues that we are faced with.

Below, I extend my thoughts on the matter, and share why I support Matthew Fox and friends in their desire to create a collective organization/movement that is Earth centered, spiritually centered, flexible, non-dogmatic, transgenerational, and inclusive of various domains of human understanding.

Throughout our tenure on this planet we have exploited our environment in order to survive. Yuval Noah Harari in his seminal work, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, eloquently cautions our tendency to overly romanticize our history on this planet. We’ve left our mark wherever we’ve found ourselves and it hasn’t quite been a harmonious, peace, loving coexistence with nature. In the process of meeting the demands of our own survival, we’ve fostered the extinction of many forms of life on Earth. I state this to remind us that the basis of our current actions are not that extraordinarily different from that of our ancestors. Throughout our history, humans have selfishly sought to maximize its own existence at the expense of others. However, we are at a juncture in the human evolutionary process where we can wreak havoc in ways our ancestors could not have imagined.

We have entered the Anthropocene, the phase in our evolution where we have become the dominant influencer on the environment and the planet as a whole. Throughout our history we have shaped the environment as it has shaped us. But now, due to drastic increases in human population and the advancement of powerful technologies, we can coerce the earth to our will on a much grander scale never before seen. And, consequently, we are not faring too well at this current juncture. We are dangerously playing a game of self-destruction. We are on a course of destroying ourselves, and most of life on earth, in ways incomprehensible to our forebearers.

Can we reverse the course and shift the tide? I think so. It will require reflection, re-evaluation, and a commitment to change. We must come together and bring together wisdom from various domains of knowing in order to transform our situation. I believe that my dear friend and mentor Matthew Fox along with Skylar Wilson and Jennifer Berit Listug are proposing a cogent contribution to our progressive culture by creating the Order of the Sacred Earth (OSE).

My appeal to OSE stems from my commitment to mitigating suffering and maximizing wellbeing, love, kindness, and compassion in the world. I have spent my adult life attempting to make sense of the human experience in order to inspire the cultivation of those values. My original locus of attention was maximizing health and healing within the African American community. As an African American male, witnessing the suffering of poor health quality within my community had become unconscionable. I felt I had to do something about it. So, I began to investigate into the root causes of poor health and suffering. Over time, I soon came to understand that the wellbeing in the black community is inseparable from that of everyone else and the planet as a whole.

We are all in this thing together, and are in need of each other in perceivable and unperceivable ways. We are dependent upon and share this spheroidal ecological system we call Earth. What we each do influences the balance of this system, consequently impacting each other’s experiences within it. We all depend on the same air, the same water, and the same earth for our sustenance and survival. The quality of the systems on Earth informs the quality of our lives.

From the resources of the Earth we have created comforts of consumption we’ve come to take as basic necessities of life. With this, we are reliant on each other to extract the Earth’s resources, produce, and distribute the artifacts of our needs and desires. As our population increases and as individuals demand more, we will need more complex economic and social systems to meet those demands. The viability and sustainability of such systems necessitate cultural agreements by collections of individuals working in some kind of cooperative fashion.

Our current systems are at a critical juncture where we need to reexamine the cultural agreements that foster them. We are feeling the brunt of their failing from poor health quality to a general malaise; from material, intellectual, and spiritual poverty to wealth and income inequality; from political disarray to a burgeoning global ecological disaster. These issues of concern are messages encouraging us to reevaluate our current narratives about how we live. Are we listening? Are we grasping the gravity of these messages? Their resolution demands our collective involvement in many areas of society on many levels. We must engage our individual agency to overcome the perceived boundaries between one another that limit our capacity to find common ground in the face of these challenges. Yes, it is possible for us to do so, and nascent collective agreements such as OSE attest to that fact.

We are responsive and adaptable creatures. Our evolution until now speaks to our extraordinary capacity to respond to our environment in order to prolong our existence. The complexity and immensity of our current set of issues will require sophisticated, coherent and well-integrated ideas to combat them. I believe we have the capacity to meet the demands of these challenges. It will not happen by simple wishful thinking. It will require our collective attention, intention, and action. We must adopt a worldview likened to that of a universalist scientist who makes observations from various modes of knowing, who collects and analyzes complex data from various mediums, and who can, from those observations and analyses, create a new story about how we are to live together on this shared Earth. This story must be sustainable, global, comprehensive, inclusive, durable, flexible, intelligent, and sophisticated.

When we were born, our souls were dropped into a world of restraints: a physical form, within a family, within a community, within a culture, bearing the karma that came in with us and gradually building a lifetime of conditioning. It’s no wonder we humans often struggle to feel natural and free.

This is why love is such a powerful force for us.

Love is the word we give to experiences of connection – whether it’s to another human being, a piece of artwork, a special place, or an inspiring idea. During moments of connection, our boundaries shatter. The small self dissolves, and we tap into a spacious place of openness, tranquility, and ease. We enter into an experience of flow that reveals a glimpse of infinite possibility. We easily recognize our union with others, and we feel our interconnectedness with the world.

Love is the driving force of my work. I believe we, as human beings, have a vast capacity for love, kindness, and compassion, and we just need the nurturing support of educational experiences to expand into this potential.

Yoga practice is a vehicle to liberate ourselves from the bonds that restrict our capacity to experience love. Using the psycho-technologies and methodologies of yoga, we can repeatedly open our consciousness up to wider physical, cognitive, imaginative, and emotional possibilities and give ourselves access to more range, freedom, and flexibility on a daily basis.

The Power of Ideas
Ideas are the means by which we construct or frame reality. How we frame reality shapes of our views, values, desires, and subsequent actions. Not only do our ideas shape our experience, they possess the power to give meaning to our experience! Meaning is what keeps us going in this life. Needless to say, ideas are pretty darn important! And today, our ideas are shaping the trajectory of life on this planet in such a way that baffles the imagination. Not only are we creating awesome technologies that enhance the human experience, unfortunately we are also the bearers of ideas that are contributing to the possibility of an uninhabitable planet, at least for most of life as we know it. Scientists are calling this time in the history of our planet the “anthropocene,” a time in which human behavior is profoundly shaping the inhabitable conditions of the planet. Yes, our ideas are shaping the trajectory of the planet! Awesome and scary as hell! The bad news is that our ‘bad’ ideas are catastrophic to life as we know it. If you want to know how ‘bad’ ideas are manifesting themselves in the world, just tune into the various news outlets. Been there, done that, far too long. But I still have moments when I need to vent. Nevertheless, I will not drag you into the quagmire of negativity. That just leads to cynicism, which is ultimately useless. I know this because I was a professional cynic, particularly when it came to politics! I will save politics for another post. At any rate, it is good to be aware of, and give due consideration to, the negative. For now, I’d rather focus on the positive because the good news is that we can entertain better ideas and consequently transform our world’s direction. Knowing this I am optimistic. I believe we can rise to the occasion with better ideas in order to confront the challenges we are facing, and there are a lot of ‘good’ ideas out there! They may not be popular, but they are out there demanding more of our attention.

Engineering Reality
We navigate our experience of reality via a story. In this conception of story I am using I include the lower instinctual mind as well as the higher intellectual mind. The higher intellectual mind is capable of superseding the lower mind. It is therefore the predominant faculty of our capacity to create a life story for ourselves. I admit this idea is a lot more complex than I am making it out to be. It would require pages to unpack, and I will save that for another time. Nonetheless, our story allows us to organize our experience. Our perceptions, beliefs, choices, and actions are essentially determined by our life story. So, there is a lot of value in constructing a well-informed and intelligently conceived story. Our story is a collection of ideas about reality arranged in a meaningful pattern that gives us a structure to live by. And ideas are a collection of words, which are symbols that represent features of reality. Words are used to name things. The naming of things allows us to mentally represent objects of our awareness. Those objects include the stuff of the mind as well as that of the senses. By naming things, we can ‘make up’ a story out of that which has been named. Wow! We can create an abstract mental representation of reality with words and use it to guide and shape our experience. Meditate on that for moment! We have the capacity to creatively manipulate reality by adapting it to our abstract play of symbolic words. Pretty damn kool! This abstract play with words is what we call thinking, and thinking is done in the realm of the imagination. By engaging the imagination through thinking and playing with ideas we conceive, manipulate, and shape reality. This is exactly how technologies are materialized. The material sciences create metaphorical models by naming the patterns observed in reality. The innovator playfully explores the imagination. Through trial and error the engineer conforms reality to the imagination using the metaphorical models created from the naming of the ‘stuff’ of reality. And voila! Like magic, there appears some of the finest of human creation: computers, smart phones, MRIs, etc. Amazing! This ability to manipulate and conform reality to our imagination can be used in practically any way we choose. And unfortunately, ill conceived, naïve, and shortsighted ideas have brought about some of the worst of human abominations, which have us on a probable path to life destruction on this planet. Note that it is only probable in terms of how we are currently using of our capacity to mold reality to our imagination. Our ideas are leading us down the path that we are on. The good news is that there are other just as probable scenarios based on different sets of ideas. Therefore, we can change the course of life on earth in a positive direction, if we choose to come up with some better ideas. So there is hope. Can we do it? Yes! Will we? I don’t know. I sure hope so. I have chosen to have faith in our capacity to do so, and do what I can to contribute to the probability of a beautiful world. Why not?

At any rate, now imagine if more of us were to explore ideas through the creative play of thinking, to address the challenges that we are facing in our world. In my mind, if we can create a smartphone, we can design sustainable technologies that are conducive to the well-being of the planet. We can shift our trajectory. We have the capacity to do so. We just have to want it badly enough to make it a reality. How do we arouse enough of us to do so is a subject for another post. What is important to understand is that we possess the capacity to successfully overcome our current challenges and put ourselves on a course that will lead to the greatest amount of well-being for life on this planet. We must actively explore ideas through critical engagement of the thinking faculty. We must educate ourselves by expanding our vocabulary, our awareness, our understanding of reality. By doing this we enhance the pool of potential ideas to play with.

Optimism
So, there is no need to be pessimistic. Why not be optimistic? Why not engage the imagination and focus the attention on possibilities? The possibilities are infinite. If we can create a freaking smartphone, we can create technologies to curb our greenhouse emissions. We can come up with ways to eliminate poverty. We can come with ways to create the greatest amount of happiness for all. We can come up with better ideas about how to relate to each other, how to love each other. We can do this only if we think creatively outside of the fictitious boundaries of self-destructive thought, and have faith in our capacity to do so. It will take work for sure. What do we have to lose by doing so? There sure as hell is a lot to lose if we don’t! That’s for sure! And as this blog unfolds, I will share with you my ideas about how we can do it.

So, I leave with these questions:
How are we going to choose to engage this awesome power to conform reality to our ideas? How are we going to shape the experience of life on this earth? What ideas shall we hold/carry near to us?